As the summer movie season draws to a close, we've got box office champions like "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises" ... and then we've got question marks like "The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure."

The newly released kids film, which features giant "Teletubbies"-esque creatures along with stars like Jaime Pressly, Cloris Leachman and Toni Braxton, has set the bar for low performance having earned just $674,000 since it opened last Wednesday.

The film even earned the title of the worst opening weekend of all time for a wide release arriving in 2,000-plus theaters, pulling in just $448,000 in its first three days, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Created by Kenn Viselman, the same fellow who introduced the Teletubbies to the U.S., the Oogieloves are happy-go-lucky characters - with names such as Zoozie, Toofie and Goobie - who are meant to be an upbeat counterpoint to what Viselman sees as darker themes in popular kids films from Pixar, he told the Los Angeles Times.

"Why can't we have something that's all love, where we don't even have the color black?" Viselman inquired during the interview. "Pixar always has the triumph of good over evil. But why does there have to be evil in the first place?"

While the obvious answer might be because that's what's drawn in audiences, among other things, Viselman insists that a profit wasn't his point anyway.

"Look, it hurts your ego when you're one of the worst openings in history or whatever it is," Viselman told the L.A. Times. "But this was never about box office - it was about creating entertainment kids could love."

soundoff(30 Responses)

Florist

I kept reading this thinking that it failed because there was no marketing- and then it says that they spent $40 million on marketing?? I've never heard of this movie until just now. I've never read an ad, seen a commercial, seen interviews with the people behind it- none of that. I have a kid I might have taken to this if I'd heard about it. What the heck kind of marketing could they have done?

My grand daughter, who turned 3 on Wednesday, is so anxious to see this movie. She wants to take her cousin so there are 3-4 of us planning on going who haven't gone yet. I don't know what it is about the trailer but my grand daughter just goes nuts when she sees those characters!

While I applaud the creator's thought of there just being a happy kids movie to go see...BUT what draws people in to a story (even little people) is conflict. It is resolution of conflict which keeps people watching and makes a movie "good". Conflict in general is not a happy go lucky thing.

There was a large fan base for the show BEDBUGS where these characters were created. They were bought out and the costumes altered. There has been poor promotion and poor acting on the characters part to support a nationwide movie. Plus without naming them, some of the human actors are more associated with adult humor and I would not take my child to a movie she is in.

If there's no pre-existing fan base for a kid's movie, then why would you expect parents to take their kids to it? The teletubbies could've had a bigger box office draw than this movie. Why were expectations so high?